Thomas de Waal's Reading List

"Yes, when it came out in 2004 this book really did cause a minor earthquake in Turkey , because it confronted Turks with the Armenians in their midst, both dead and alive. It’s an extraordinary story that broke the taboo in Turkey almost overnight, about the fact that so many people in Turkey had Armenian grandparents, or great-grandparents, who were the survivors as children of these horrific deportations in 1915, but who had been absorbed into Turkish society. Fethiye Cetin tells the story of how her grandmother – a very beloved figure – in her mid-sixties suddenly revealed in secret that she wasn’t the Turkish lady Seher, who her granddaughter believed her to be, but an Armenian called Heranus. Her parents were not her real parents but her adoptive parents, who’d picked her up from of deportation column in 1915 as the Armenians were being destroyed – and as most of her family were being destroyed. This was a secret that she had carried with her most of her life. “Every generation deals with this tragedy in a different way.” It is a double-story, both of Seher/Heranus telling her life story and her childhood story, and also of the granddaughter coming to this extraordinary recognition of who her grandmother really is. Her whole identity is turned upside-down and she seeks out the lost Armenian relatives of her grandmother. She did track them down, but sadly only after her grandmother had died. It’s a story on many levels and a story which challenged Turkey on many levels."

"Well, obviously this is both an Armenian story and a Kurdish story. It’s newly published family memoir which is now in English. I found it fascinating. I should start by saying that all these authors – or protagonists – were born at pretty much the same time, all around 1900, or a few years after; they were all children during 1915 but they all have very divergent experiences. Some of them manage to make it to the States, one makes it to Russian Armenia, the Soviet Union, one is completely absorbed into a Turkish family – who we’ve discussed – and then this extraordinary story, of an Armenian boy who lives as a Kurd for several years, in his teenage years, and is absorbed into this Kurdish household. It’s a vivid portrait of a mountain Kurdish community living in this pre-modern state, very beautifully observed. It’s told by a young boy who is very aware of his Armenian identity and is looking for chances to get away, which he eventually does at the end of the First World War in 1919. He escapes and re-finds his Armenian family. So it is the same story trajectory but with this extraordinary portrait of a Kurdish community in the middle. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At the end you’re getting the beginning of the next phase of violence and conflict in this region. The Kurdish rebellions are already beginning. First the Armenians are targeted by the Ottoman state and then it’s a matter of a Kurdish-Turkish fight, which then erupts in even greater force in the 1920s. Yes. If we take a step back, we’re looking at this enormously dramatic and tragic story in 1915, which later became known as the Armenian Genocide: the story of how the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire – with a very few exceptions – was targeted by the Young Turk government in Istanbul during the First World War for deportation. Of course this had multiple effects and – in a few cases – armed resistance, which is Aram Haigaz’s story and, to a certain extent, the story in the novel about Van by Gurgen Mahari: Burning Orchards."

"This is an exceptional novel which deserves to be much more widely read, it’s beautifully written by a very talented writer with an extraordinary story. Gurgen Mahari grew up in Van in the Ottoman Empire then went to Russian Armenia – then in the Soviet Union – and spent many years as a political prisoner in the Gulag. He came back to Yerevan and then wrote this novel, which is basically an autobiographical novel about Van in 1915, which was the epicentre of a lot of Armenian-Turkish violence. It’s subversive because it’s not a martyrology, it’s not a story of Armenian victimhood. It’s told very much from the inside and it’s very satirical about the Armenian revolutionary parties and about the role they played in provoking and precipitating Turkish violence. This aspect of the novel was very controversial for the period in which it was published, the 60s, when Soviet Armenians were just rediscovering their political-national consciousness. This subversive take on the Armenian national idea was too much for the Yerevan of that period and Mahari was forced to withdraw the book from the publishers, some people even burned copies of the book. He re-submitted a self-censored version of this novel, his life’s work. But, by the sound of it, the experience broke him; he died a few years later. That’s right. The complete version was fortunately published much later. When we have a great tragic event, a great atrocity – and I think the Armenian Genocide was the worst atrocity of the First World War – there is a tendency to sanctify it, to make the event into a pure morality tale. For me, that forms a barrier towards our human understanding of it. These five books – four memoirs , one autobiographical novel – bring us back to the human story, the fact that Turks could be good or bad, the fact that Armenians could be brave or not so brave, the choices people made, and the fact that this was history unfolding in real time. These extraordinary events of war and destruction throw up incredible human stories. They tell us the story in a way that some of the dry history, and certainly the political propaganda about these events do not."

"I chose this book as an example of that because Armenians are one of those people, unfortunately, whose national identity has been very identified with tragedy, with martyrdom. They’re not alone. We think of the Irish, the Jews, the Palestinians as nations who have some very awful tragedy at the centre of their historical experience. Armenians obviously fit into that category. But I chose this book because it’s an example of how it doesn’t have to be like that. It was published in the 50s and it’s a very affirming story of someone who has overcome the experience of immigration and tragedy and makes it in America. He’s a classic American immigrant in that he celebrates his birthday on July 24th, which was the day in 1922 when he landed at Ellis Island. He describes how he founded a famous restaurant in San Francisco, then went to Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and was in charge of food operations for the US Army. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a great read. It’s not as though he was suppressing the Armenian tragedy, but he’s writing a story of emigration, of adaptation, of survival. It’s a rather bracing and a rather different take on Armenian history."

"That’s right, although it’s also a story of immigration as well. This is a beautiful book which deserves to be republished, it’s out of print. The title is rather unfortunate. I like everything about this book except the title: I Ask you Ladies and Gentlemen , which is rather meaningless. If it was given a different title, it could be a bestseller as a memoir of this period. Again, it’s without this sense of victimhood, it’s a story of survival, although of great tragedy because his parents are lost in the 1915 genocide. As a small boy he’s also basically sold as a slave at one point on the deportation march and survives by his wits in various families and then escapes. It’s also about the town of Trebizond – a place that you know, Bruce, and have written about from the Pontic Greek perspective – so there are many Greeks in this book. He also describes living in various bits of the Black Sea at the end of the First World War until he emigrates to America, and describes the immigrant experience of being both welcome and alien. It’s a story lived in real time and described very beautifully. It deserves much wider readership. The Armenians are a classic diaspora in that sense as they’re mercantile, adaptable. They have the stereotype of being able to survive anywhere, of practising various crafts and having business acumen. But the other thing to note here is that every generation is different. This is very much a theme of my book Great Catastrophe , which is about the aftermath of 1915. Every generation deals with this tragedy in a different way. In the 1920s it was through silence, talking about it at home, and survival. In the 1940s the issue hitches itself to Second World War politics. In the 1960s it’s different again, it’s about identity politics and the invention of the Civil Rights movement. It’s a reminder that nothing is static. There’s an assumption that the way an event is viewed in the collective consciousness of a community is the way it’s always been viewed, but that’s very far from the truth and certainly very far from the truth in the case of the Armenian Genocide. “Rather than a pure morality tale, these five books bring us back to the human story of the Armenian Genocide.” Absolutely. And of course the Armenians are rightly proud of the fact that they’ve had their own alphabet since the fifth century, one of the main streets Yerevan — Mesrop Mashtots — is named after the monk who invented that alphabet. One of the first publishing industries in the world was Armenian: first through the church, and later secular. So there is a great literary tradition amongst the Armenians and at least three of the writers here are very literary writers as well. That’s a very good way of putting it. They’re a very brainy, literary people but they’re also very adaptable and associated with business. They are one of those people that are quite small in number in the world but make quite a significant contribution to world culture. I agree. I want to add that not one of these books uses the word genocide and that fits with my own agenda in my book. There is an important debate about the word genocide and the events of 1915, but behind that there’s an even bigger story about what happened to the Armenians, what happened to their culture, and what is owed to them in terms of memory and honouring their culture. A more direct route to understanding those bigger issues – certainly in Turkey – is to leave the word genocide to one side and to engage with the real, living human history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That’s right and I think if you read just these five books alone, you get a proper human and historical understanding of those events."

"Well, it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? I think the title of the book probably puts off a lot of people who would otherwise be very interested in it. Georgi Derluguian is a fascinating man. He’s an Armenian from the North Caucasus who worked in Africa in Soviet times as an interpreter. He’s a sociologist who then emigrated to Chicago, so he’s got this amazingly sophisticated understanding of the sociology of the post-Soviet space, but also he gets around and actually goes to these places – Chechnya, Abkhazia, Karabakh – and he’s a local as well, so the combination of those characteristics means this is really the best book at unpacking and disentangling what happened in the Caucasus at the end of the Soviet period. He’s chosen as his main protagonist this extraordinary character who is the secret admirer of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist and thinker. His only fan in the Caucasus is this chap, a nationalist originally called Yuri Shanibov, but who renamed himself Musa Shanib. Shanib is from Kabardino-Balkaria. We get this biography about his life trajectory, how he started in the Communist party, then became a dissident, then briefly became a nationalist hero, then got marginalised by everyone else and is now pretty much on his own again. Georgi uses this story as his thread, but the bigger canvas is a very interesting theoretical explanation about how the Soviet Union ended the way it did. Back in the 70s and 80s a lot of Western scholars argued that the Soviet Union was a prison house of nations and that if it did ever end there would be an uprising against ethnic Russians and Uzbekistan might be the place where it would happen. But, in fact, it happened in a very different way. Some of the most loyal nationalities, like the Armenians, were the first to rise up, but they rose up not against Russians but against their neighbours. Very different things happened which people hadn’t expected and this book really explains how Soviet society broke down in terms of competition for resources and in terms of nationalities. He also talks about the groups who didn’t fit into the Soviet economy. He calls them the sub-proletariat and they were the kind of criminalised class that then became the fuel for conflict in the Caucasus. It’s a rich book and it’s a great read that deserves a much wider readership."

"Thomas Goltz is another extraordinary character. He’s an American journalist who was living in Turkey and spoke Turkish, and almost by accident ended up in Azerbaijan in 1991. To my mind this is the best on-the-ground inside account of what it was like to live in the margins of the Soviet Union as it broke up. We’ve got a lot from Moscow in that period, where there was still this veneer of civilised political discourse, but once you got out to the fringes you realised that actually it was much more about the desperate scramble for the spoils of the Soviet Union and extraordinary battles for power. I think Azerbaijan must have had the most bizarre battles of all. It had this war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and then it had all these internal battles. At one point there were three coups or counter-coups in a week. Goltz was there and he knew all the characters and he saw the Karabakh war from the Azerbaijani side close up. He doesn’t buy into any of the ‘transition to a market economy’ or any of the nice little models that most journalists were using. He writes in a totally direct fashion and has this sort of Hunter S Thomson style of the heavy-drinking, fast-living journalist in Azerbaijan. This is a small classic. One of the themes running through Goltz’s books is that foreign editors have a very narrow agenda and ignore important stories that fall outside it. Goltz was the first witness to all these Azerbaijani refugees coming out of the town of Khojali where there’d been a massacre by the Armenians. He and a couple of other people saw what was happening and desperately tried to alert the world media but initially got a brush-off because it didn’t fit with the news agenda the editors had. Eventually it did get out and became a big story, and that whole Khojali story has become a central part of the national narrative of modern Azerbaijan. It was a great mobilising factor for Azerbaijanis to go to war. Goltz gives you the blow-by-blow account of how it all happened – and it doesn’t reflect on anyone, on either the Armenian or Azerbaijani side."

"This really looks at the other side. The weakest part of Goltz’s book is that he makes only one trip to Armenia and it’s a very unsatisfactory chapter, so this is the other side of that war over Nagorno-Karabakh – which I myself have written a book on. This is an extraordinary read and it tells you the similarities and yet the differences between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. Just to give you some background, Markar Melkonian is the brother of this romantic warrior/scholar/terrorist, a Californian/Armenian archaeologist, who adopted the nationalist cause. He went to Lebanon and joined an Armenian terrorist group where he was responsible for murdering a Turkish diplomat and killing his daughter by mistake. He was a man with blood on his hands but also an extremely intelligent and, in his own way, incredibly principled man. He went off to Karabakh and was outraged by the corruption among the local Soviet Armenians. Anyway, he eventually got killed and his brother, Markar, wrote this unvarnished biography. Markar Melkonian doesn’t leave out any of the bad stuff, though obviously we get the heroic side. We see that on the Armenian side there was this Soviet, corrupt, fratricidal element to the conflict, but also there was an extra element, which was the worldwide Armenian nationalism that was people projecting the suffering of their grandparents at the hands of the Turks into this war against the Azerbaijani people. It was one of the things that actually helped the Armenians win."

"It’s a bit of a classic. The Romeo and Juliet of the Caucasus. There’s actually a very interesting book by Tom Reiss about the author, who was a Baku Jew called Lev Nussimbaum. No, not any more. Tom Reiss got hold of original manuscripts and absolutely nailed it. Anyway, Nussimbaum converted to Islam and went to live in Germany in the 1930s and wrote some other books under the name Essad Bey, but this is by far his best book. And it’s this incredibly vivid (he uses caricature but it never becomes cartoon) novel about the Caucasus before the First World War, and you’re reminded that what happened in the 90s was a sort of repeat of what happened in the period between the First World War and the Bolshevik re-invasion of the Caucasus in 1920 – ethnic conflict, chaos, breakdown and foreign intervention. But then you’ve got the love story between Ali, the Azeri Muslim, and Nino the Georgian and how they come from two different worlds but how their worlds meet in the city of Baku, this cosmopolitan city. Baku was always vulnerable to conflict and conflict tore it apart in that era. It managed to get back together again in the Soviet era but then the war with the Armenians happened in 1990 and the Armenians, Russians and Jews all left. It has lost its cosmopolitan feeling over the past 20 years. But the thing about Ali and Nino is that every page has its laugh out loud delights: the stereotype of the Georgian cousins who try to kill you with their hospitality and the Armenian who drives over a bridge and says: ‘This bridge was built by my ancestors and Alexander the Great drove over it.’ And Ali looks at the inscription and it says, ‘Built in 1880’. No one gets off lightly. It’s a sheer delight."

"I was reading this to my daughter and I suddenly realised it should be compulsory bedtime reading for all children in the Caucasus because it’s actually about ethnic conflict. Well, it’s more explicitly about the Cold War, but I read it through my Caucasian lens. It’s about the Yooks and the Zooks and it’s about 20 pages long. On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall… my grandfather took me out to the wall. For a while he stood silent. Then finally he said, with a very sad shake of his very old head, ‘As you know, on this side of the wall we are Yooks. On the far other side of this wall live the Zooks.’ Then my grandfather said, ‘It’s high time that you knew of the terribly horrible thing that Zooks do. In every Zook house and in every Zook town every Zook eats his bread with the butter side down!’ Then the Yooks and the Zooks get into this conflict, and it’s generally true about what Freud called the narcissism of minor difference – that people end up in conflict with people who are only marginally different from themselves. Yooks and Zooks could be Georgians and Abkhazians or Armenians and Azeris, who actually have so much in common. They adopt this bizarre identity and historical arguments to prove hatred for one another when in reasonable times they get along fine. Well, I think most of the time they are aware that they have a lot in common, but for political reasons they can be manipulated and a bit of satire might help remind them of their better instincts."